That Was The Year That Was, On Tv

January 02, 1992

Americans watched a lot of television in 1991. It wasn`t so much the sitcoms and other scripted fare of the networks` entertainment units. But, in offices by day and in our homes at night, we watched a dramatic series of real-life events play out, live, on television.

We watched a war begin and end, saw bombs land in the Mideast and heard allies and enemies state their cases. We saw the Soviet Union endure an attempted coup, watched Boris Yeltsin lead a rebellion and, for months to follow, saw the Communist system unravel in Moscow stores and Kremlin halls.

We watched Anita Hill present her allegations against Clarence Thomas and heard his impassioned defense. We watched as a sensational sexual charge enveloped the Kennedy family in controversy.

All on live television. We watched as a nation and shared in the events. And we shared them, simultaneously, with people in places as distant as Baghdad, Berlin, Buenos Aires and Bombay.

The technology of global television, especially Atlanta-based CNN, is changing how we learn about world events, and sometimes the very course of these events. That`s because international leaders from our White House to the Russian White House are watching too.

As correspondent Timothy J. McNulty reported in the Tribune series

``Video Diplomacy,`` international networks and influential programs such as ABC-TV`s ``Nightline`` are monitored on all the populated continents. And with global distances shrunken to mere seconds, national leaders are using these forums as high-speed, direct-access vehicles for sending diplomatic messages across international lines.

During the Soviet coup, President Bush and his advisers kept tabs on breaking developments via commercial television, getting information with greater speed and impact than was available through formal diplomatic and intelligence channels. Bush`s decisions were shaped by what he saw on television, and he used television appearances of his own to influence decisions on the other side of the world.

Libya`s Moammar Gadhafi and Jordan`s King Hussein are among CNN`s regular callers, telephoning Atlanta when they want to make a quick point to friends or foes. Iraq`s Saddam Hussein used TV appearances, though not very successfully, in a personal effort to court U.S. opinion during the gulf war. Satellite communications literally bring the world home, often on an instantaneous basis. There is both promise and danger in this unprecedented access: The hope of greater understanding among countries and cultures must be balanced against the risk that political and diplomatic decisions will be made too hastily to keep atop breaking events.

The heightened concern for the suffering of faraway people that is generated by their graphic presence may be undone by a numb resignation to the overwhelming constancy of the human misery we now see.

The opportunity to develop personal conclusions on the basis of unfiltered information must be weighed against the unknown elements of what we do not see.

The communications revolution is far from ended. New technologies will bring home more instant information, from more places and more sources. Fascination may turn to ennui. The multiplying images may mass into sheer overload, beyond human capacity to sort or absorb.

Perhaps the greatest peril is that we may come to think that all of what we see firsthand is true, or that the entire truth is simply the sum total of what the camera can capture.

The increasing manipulation of the live lens by politicians and ideologues worldwide makes it even more essential that we carefully sort through the melange of images, that we listen as well as watch, and that we turn the television off every so often to think about what we`ve seen.